Here we archive
“Here’s A Thought” items from the year 2000.
To return to the current year, click here.
Addional years’ archives are also accessible from the
same page.

December 30, 2000

What is divine in Man is elusive and impalpable,
and he [she] is easily tempted to embody it in a collective form – a church,
a country, a social system, a leader – so that he [she] may realize it with
less effort and serve it with more profit. Yet the attempt to externalize the
kingdom of heaven in a temporal shape must end in disaster. It cannot be created
by charters or constitutions, nor established by arms. Those who set out for
it alone will reach it together, and those who seek it in company will perish
by themselves.

Sooner or later, all the peoples of the world
will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform
this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to
be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge,
aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Our particular principles of religion are a subject
of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man’s and trouble none
with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine,
our friend’s or our foe’s, are exactly the right.

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
Yet not for power (power of herself
Would come uncalled for), but to live by law,
Acting the law we live by without fear;
And, because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Oenone

November 13, 2000

Self of my Self, for Thou art but I,
Self of my Self, for I am but Thou,
Twain of us in one shall never die,
What do they matter – the why and how?

Perhaps the deepest reason we are afraid of death
is that we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate
identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely
on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our
“biography”, our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit card
… It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security.
So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not
our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be so beautiful,
talented, gorgeous, fabulous?” Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are
a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing
enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around
you. This is not just in some of us, it is in everyone. And as we let our light
shine, we unconsciously give other people the permission to do the same. As
we are liberated from our fears, our presence automatically liberates others.

Eleanor Roosevelt
[Attributed, on the web. We do
not know the precise source.]

September 3, 2000

The light of the sun is seen in its full brilliance
only when the clouds are totally removed. Likewise, the true glory of the Self
is perceived only when the mind remains free from all tendencies created by
its good as well as its evil actions.

This onward movement of the ego from the seat
of the Kundalini to the lotus of myriad petals
has been found to be of five kinds, like that of an ant, a fish, a snake, a
frog, or a monkey, according to the intensity of its desire to realize the goal.
… This is the usual method of realizing highest Truth. But the soul, being
really infinite, cannot have any motion; for how can infinity go from one place
to another, it having no outside and so nowhere to go? Hence, whenever motion
is ascribed to the Infinite Being, we do it out of our ignorance of Its true
nature. But a jnani, who has been able to
understand clearly his [her] infinite nature intellectually, from whom all desires
have fallen off and who has thus been left pure and single, does not need to
go from one place to another, from a lower to a higher center. He [she] knows
that his [her] true home is the heart where he [she] unceasingly resides in
the three conditions of waking, dream, and sleep, whether he [she] knows it
or not. In the heart alone the Unmanifested Being of infinite power manifests
Itself as soul and ego, both of which never go out of it really, although they
imagine them to be outside it.

Note: A jnani is a practitioner
of jnana yoga, the path of discernment. See also here. Return to text.

August 21, 2000

As long as the bee is outside the lotus, so long
will it have to fly round and round and buzz, but once it gets into the flower,
and tastes the honey there, both its wanderings and buzzings cease. So, as long
as man remains outside the lotus of his [her] heart, he [she] has to wander
in search of pleasure in vain, but once he [she] goes inside it, and tastes
the nectar of Divine communion, all his [her] wanderings cease once and for
all.

People seeking mystical attainment expect it on
their own terms, and hence generally exclude themselves from it before they
start. Nobody can hope to arrive at illumination if he [she] thinks that he
[she] knows what it is, and believes that he [she] can achieve it through a
well-defined path which he [she] can conceive at the moment of starting.

What you can do or dream you can do, begin it;
boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

July 29, 2000

It’s amazing stuff. Our neurons fire a few micro-volts
of electricity, and we call it thought. At the same time, all of us are constantly
bathed in massive waves of electro-magnetic fields … and for every field,
there are millions of harmonics. It makes me tingle just thinking about it!

The supreme experience is staggering, enrapturing,
blissful, and inspiring, but at the same time inexplicable and ungraspable by
the intellect. The experience is supremely illuminating because it reveals the
grandeur, sublimity and the eternal nature of the soul, but beyond that – what?
All that is beyond lies out of the reach of the intellect, and hence cannot
be translated into any language devised by the mind.

We cannot live according to a human standard of
life and at the same time reap the fruitage of the spiritual life: We cannot
live according to an-eye-for-an-eye and a-tooth-for-a-tooth philosophy, nor
depend upon treasures laid up where moth and rust corrupt; we cannot live according
to the human code and at the same time pray to God for spiritual light, spiritual
bread, spiritual wine, and spiritual water.

He who bends to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

From A Grain of Sand
Poems by William Blake
Selected by Rosemary Manning

May 9, 2000

After a trip to Canada, Roy Rogers, the cowboy
singer and actor, was asked what he had learned about faith there. Rogers replied, “I
reckon the most important thing I learned about faith in Canada was the most
important thing I have learned about faith in Hawaii, the British Isles, and
all over – it works!”

The Answer is God
a biography of Roy Rogers & Dale Evans,
by Elise Miller Davis

May 6, 2000

The beginning of Wisdom is this: “I don’t
know, and I can’t find out”.

TZF

May 3, 2000

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era
(1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full,
and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer
could restrain himself: “It is overfull. No more will go in!”
“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are
full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you
first empty your cup?”

As frightened children look everywhere for the
imaginary ghost, so sick humanity sees danger in every direction, and looks
for relief in all ways except the right one. Darkness induces fear. The adult,
in bondage to his beliefs, no more comprehends his real being than does the
child; and the adult must be taken out of his darkness, before he can get rid
of the illusive sufferings which throng the gloaming.